1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the transfer of data files between two servers over any transfer medium and relates in particular to an object-oriented method and system for transferring a file system from a source data storage in source data processing to a destination data storage in a destination data processing unit.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the growth in data file transfers over data transmission networks such as Internet and the increasing amount of data which is stored in the data storage of the data processing units under the form of file systems, the transfer of data files over a transfer medium has raised more and more problems. Thus, it is current today to have to transfer a complex directory structure composed of more than 200 subdirectories with a depth greater than 5 levels and including more than 1000 files that represent a volume of data greater than 1 gigabit.
When transferring data files over an IP network, a known solution consists in using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). But, this protocol requires one to generate a directory identical to the origin directory in the destination equipment. Unfortunately, many tools based upon FTP do not automatically create a directory structure. Furthermore, with a complex file system containing many files representing a very important volume of data, checking the data integrity is not easy and requires an important processing time.
Always when transferring the files over the IP network, a partial solution to the above problem is to use a specific tool such as Softdist or Tivoli. Such tools use a proprietary code-packaging method to generate code blocks only readable and usable by themselves. This tool solves the problem of data integrity but it remains a drawback that it is a proprietary method which depends entirely on the operating system of the destination server. Furthermore, since the code blocks generated by the tool are only readable by themselves, it is not possible to know the contents of these code-blocks.
In order to be able to transfer data files over any kind of connection and not only a network, installer tools have been developed. Unfortunately, such tools are not adapted for transferring important system files. As for the Tivoli tools, they depend on the operating system of the destination server. Furthermore, as these tools create auto-extractable files, it is not possible to know the contents of such auto-extractable files.